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| Bro. Howard Kanowitz presenting ‘What’s Wrong with the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences?’ this morning at New Jersey Lodge of Masonic Research and Education 1786 at Freemasons Hall in North Brunswick. He spoke of Music, but is not conducting an orchestra here. |
I’ve always insisted lunch is the most important meal of the workday, and it’s essential to a daylight lodge as well.
New Jersey Lodge of Masonic Research and Education 1786 met this morning at Freemasons Hall in North Brunswick for what turned out to be a pretty quick communication. Only ten were in attendance, which was unfortunate because our speaker was the inimitable Howard Kanowitz, doing his thing as only he can do. Some of our principal officers were absent, including Secretary Erich, who is in California speaking at the International Conference on Freemasonry. He sent me an email last night describing the debauchery few would believe is possible among Freemasonry’s celebrity intellectuals.
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✓ Dr. Heather K. Calloway, Executive Director of University Collections at Indiana University.
✓ Robert L.D. Cooper, retired Curator of the Grand Lodge of Scotland and now co-host of the M.A.G.I. Podcast.
✓ Mark Tabbert, formerly of the George Washington Masonic National Memorial and now of the Masonic Service Association of North America, and author, and the other M.A.G.I. co-host, etc.
✓ The aforementioned Erich Huhn.
✓ And David Palladino, who is practically the lone champion of the humanities in New Jersey Freemasonry.
Other speakers are not confirmed yet but, trust me, they are authors from academia you know.
We received some sad news today—news to me anyway—as Len March, our research lodge’s inaugural treasurer, who manned that desk for many years, had passed away.
Also, it was noted how 2026 marks twenty-five years since MW David A. Chase set us to labor Under Dispensation. Vivat!
But lunch today—technically First Lunch, since we got to the restaurant before 11 a.m.—was a great time together. Junior Warden Dave, Senior Deacon Glenn, Bob, and I gabbed about Freemasonry over good grub and coffee. We chatted about things that could be improved in the field of Masonic education in New Jersey. Naturally, that topic could fill an immersive three-day conference of its own, so we circumscribed our desires and talked for a fast paced two hours about what we feasibly could affect. Lunch was longer than the meeting that brought us together in the first place.
Oh yeah, the meeting!
Howard presented “What’s Wrong with the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences?” Music is the short answer.
By that, he means the citation of music within the Middle Chamber Lecture of the Fellow Craft Degree is discordant. Here’s how New Jersey’s version of the lecture addresses Music:
Music is that elevated science which affects the passions by sound. There are few who have not felt the charms of music, and acknowledged its expressions to be intelligible to the heart. It is a language of delightful sensation, far more eloquent than words; it touches and gently agitates the passions; it wraps us in melancholy, or elevates us in joy; it melts us in tenderness, or excites us to war. It is truly congenial to the nature of man for, by its powerful charms, the most discordant passions may be subdued.
I’d say what Howard means is, grouped among the Quadrivium, Music—in this particular Masonic context—is incongruent. The lecture’s talk of the incitement of passions, melancholy, joy, etc. makes Music sound more akin to the Trivium’s arts of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic, whereas Music would belong with Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy if we instead noted its nature as a science of sound. Naturally, he spoke of the Harmony of Spheres so we understood why Music is a sibling of Arithmetic and Astronomy. This is something I’d never thought about, possibly because of my failure to internalize and recite the lecture for the Second Degree when I should have as an aspiring lodge officer decades ago—or since.
As an aside, let me explain that Music-as-science is how it worked originally. The Music paragraph in William Preston’s Illustrations of Masonry (1775 edition) says:
Music teaches us the art of forming concords so as to make delightful harmony by a mathematical and proportional arrangement of acute, grave, and mixed sounds. This art is by a series of experiments reduced to a demonstrative science with respect to tones and the intervals of sound only. It inquires into the nature of concords and discords, and enables us to find out the proportion between them by numbers.
There’s a saying at New Jersey’s research lodge: Ben Hoff (our other eminent scholar) views Freemasonry through a microscope, and Howard views Freemasonry through a telescope, meaning Ben searches internally in his forensic studies of ritual evolution, and Howard scans a broad horizon to chart another direction Freemasonry can send us. Ben would’ve pointed out that Preston bit had he been there. Anyway, the world history Howard unspooled took us from Pythagoras and Martianus Capella to Brahe and Kepler, with stops in Prague and Vienna to visit Mozart and Beethoven. Really outstanding work, and presented without reading material—no paper nor notes, nothing, nada. An appropriate topic for π Day too.
Without revealing the substance of the private conversation during First Lunch, we groused about how few Masons can be motivated to come hear fascinating Masonic talks. Never mind conceiving, researching, and writing such pieces of architecture themselves, but just showing up to listen to one of the best in the field.
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| A new clock has been hung in the lodge room! I’ve been attending various meetings here for twenty years and I’d swear the previous clock was always off by fifteen or sixteen hours. This one correctly shows the division of time. |
We will do it again on Saturday, June 13. I’ll be back at the lectern September 12 to recount a far less enchanting tale of Masonry’s past.
